In yesterday’s Hill Times, a few would-be Liberal candidates in rural ridings are talking about how they want nominations to start sooner than later, citing the challenges of rural life when it comes to door-knocking – owing to the difficulties of travel in the winter, the best time for them to meet constituents is in the summer and autumn. Hence, they want the nomination process to be over before summer 2018, so that they have a long lead-time to do the campaigning in large rural ridings – something that is less of an issue in urban ridings.

As far as suggestions go, it’s not a terrible one. I think that parties should have a fairly long lead-up with a nominated candidate, particularly in unheld ridings, so that they can do the work of grassroots engagement and get people involved in the process. This also being said, in a riding that has an incumbent, you also don’t want to run the nomination too early because an open nomination is also a way to hold that incumbent to account by their grassroots members, so if you hold the nomination too early, you don’t get as much of their tenure to judge them by. I know that some Liberals are agitating to have their nominations protected, while Conservatives have a threshold system in place to protect their nominations (which I am less keen on because it can short-circuit accountability), but I also know that the Liberals haven’t made up their minds how they’re dealing with nominations for 2019, which boggles the mind. Of course, this is part of the fallout of their wholesale party constitution rewrite (which, I will remind you, centralised even more power in the leader’s office at the expense of the grassroots), so we’ll see how they decide to deal with this, and how much lip-service they pay to the grassroots while still keeping their newly acquired centralized power. Suffice to say, nominations remain the most important part of our democratic process, so watching a party flail about it is never a good thing.

Good reads:

• Justin Trudeau is off to Ireland to visit their prime minister (aka Taoiseach), with a stop in Scotland to see the Queen to possibly talk about his pick for GG.
• Trudeau’s next stop is of course the G20 in Hamburg, where he will have to dance between Angela Merkel and Donald Trump.
• Here is Paul Wells’ interview with Justin Trudeau, as well as an interview with the PEI Guardian about local issues including regional development politics.
• Here are some senators talking about how cabinet members make concerted efforts to lobby them into voting for government bills.
• Statistics are showing that more women are having their citizenship tests rejected, which points to greater structural barriers.
• There are concerns that funds given for domestic violence shelters in the North were insufficient because they were based on population and not need.
• Peter Shawn Taylor walks through some more context around Hector-Louis Langevin, and others who have had statues taken now and names effaced.

Odds and ends:

Tristin Hopper puts some context around the American Revolution, and it paints a very different picture than the Americans like to paint for themselves.

In case you missed it, our two new astronaut candidates were announced on Canada Day.